Appears in
Oxford Companion to Wine

By Jancis Robinson

Published 2006

  • About

Ordinary wine is occasionally packaged in cans (usually 25 cl), which have no harmful effect on wine destined for early consumption. The advantages are that cans are lighter and less fragile than bottles, but the material from which they are made is not, unlike glass, inert. Cans are lacquered on the inside to give chemical resistance to the acid in the wine. However, if there is the slightest pinhole in the lacquer, the wine attacks the aluminium, producing foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide, and the wine may turn black.